GIS Applications in Climate and Meteorology

Recent efforts using Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for applications in climate and meteorology are surveyed. Unique applications for GIS include hydromet asset database analysis and management, fusion of hydromet data with traditional GIS applications, and new hydromet applications which exploit GIS features and capabilities. Attention is given to emerging techniques which couple GIS with hydromet models such as NCAR/PSU MM5 and published GRIB datasets, as well as with remote sensing data products such as NESDIS ATOVS profiles. GIS provides tremendous capabilities to analyze, transform, and visualize hydrometeorological data. Given the growing demand for enterprise GIS solutions in business, utilities, agriculture, transportation, military, emergency management, and government, COTS GIS providers have been rapidly developing high quality products and tools which have interesting implications for climate and meteorology. The key factor distinguishing COTS GIS from the various special-purpose Weather Processing Systems is long-term maintenance and logistics support, with COTS GIS demonstrating significantly lower overall cost.